Good Samaritan Society - Forest City

Good Samaritan Society - Forest City is in Forest City, Iowa. The city has 5,848 people. This is a decent facility, with an overall grade of C. This facility seems to have a few things going for it. The best part of this nursing home's profile was is its inspection rating. Inspection reports are discussed in the next section.

While this nursing home's overall grade was not bad, it really excelled in the category of inspections. In fact, we awarded it a grade of A- for that category, which is one of our highest scores. We weigh several aspects of a nursing home's inspection report in computing these inspection ratings. One of those factors is health deficiencies. You should keep in mind that the severity of these deficiencies is usually more meaningful than the number of deficiencies, as some of these are relatively minor. Fortunately, although this nursing home had a few minor dings on its report, it had no severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G, H, I, J, K and L. This tells you the government inspectors did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies shouldn't lead you to cross a nursing home off your list.

Another strength of this nursing home is its favorable grade in nursing. We awarded them one of our better scores in that area, with a grade of A-. The nursing rating consists of quite a few factors, but the primary consideration is the level of nurse hours spent with patients. This nursing home averages 3.4 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Lastly, we also looked at certain nursing quality-based metrics in computing our nursing grades. These include minimizing residents' pressure ulcers and major falls. We view these areas as predictive indicators of the quality of nursing care provided, since better care tends to reduce these problems.

The third area we graded is short-term care. In that category, we awarded this facility a solid grade of C. With our short-term care assessment, we attempt to forge a valuable gauge for rehabilitation. In doing so, we look at the nursing home's level of highly-skilled nursing services, including both registered nurses and physical therapy, as well as speech therapy. In this place's case, we were surprised to learn that it actually provides less registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than the average facility. The final item we looked at in this area is the number of residents that eventually returned home from the facility. We found that just 35 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

This facility's worst category is long-term care, which is the final category we looked at. We gave it an F in this area. Despite multiple solid scores in other areas, this grade is nevertheless of a concern so we felt obligated to make sure you are aware. If you are seeking services other than short-term rehabilitation, you should take a close look at each nursing home's long-term care scores. Once we assessed the volume of care provided by aids and other staff, we then looked at the nursing home's vaccination records. This nursing home vaccinated 96.55172 percent of its residents against pneumonia, which is better than the majority of nursing homes. To our surprise, this facility was able to keep its residents out of the hospital. Indeed, it had just 0.94 hospitalizations per 1,000 long-term resident days. Sadly, a few of its other scores in this category were not as favorable as these.